BOSTON — As the quest to find a resting place for the body of Boston Marathon bombing suspect Tamerlan Tsarnaev drags on, his widow continues to face questions from federal authorities and has hired a criminal lawyer with experience defending terrorism cases.

Katherine Russell added New York lawyer Joshua Dratel to her legal team, her attorney Amato DeLuca said Wednesday. Dratel has represented a number of terrorism suspects in federal courts and military commissions, including Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, detainee David Hicks, who attended an al-Qaida-linked training camp in Afghanistan.

Dratel’s “unique, specialized experience” will help ensure that Russell “can assist in the ongoing investigation in the most constructive way possible,” DeLuca said in a written statement.

He said Russell, who has not been charged with any crime, will continue to meet with investigators as “part of a series of meetings over many hours where she has answered questions.”

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Providence-based DeLuca and Miriam Weizenbaum have been representing Russell, who is from Rhode Island. They specialize in civil cases such as personal injury law.

An FBI spokeswoman wouldn’t comment when asked Wednesday whether Russell is co-operating. DeLuca has said Russell had no reason to suspect her husband and his brother in the deadly April 15 bombing.

Tamerlan Tsarnaev and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, ethnic Chechen brothers from southern Russia and living in Massachusetts, are accused of planting two shrapnel-packed pressure-cooker bombs near the marathon finish line, killing three people and injuring about 260.

Dzhokhar, who was captured hiding in a tarp-covered boat outside a house in a Boston suburb, was charged with using a weapon of mass destruction to kill. Their mother has said the charges against them are lies.

Tamerlan Tsarnaev was killed in a getaway attempt after a gunbattle with police, and no burial place has been found for him yet. His body was released by the state medical examiner May 1 and has been in limbo since.

In Washington, the first in a series of hearings was planned Thursday to review government’s initial response to the bombing, what information authorities received about the brothers before the bombings and whether they handled it correctly. The hearing on Capitol Hill comes less than three weeks after Dzhokhar Tsarnaev’s arrest.

The FBI and CIA separately received vague warnings from Russia’s government in 2011 that Tamerlan Tsarnaev and his mother were religious militants.

Russell, Tamerlan Tsarnaev’s wife, had wanted his body turned over to his side of the family, which claimed it. Nineteen days after his death, cemeteries still refused to take his remains and government officials deflected questions about where he could be buried.

On Wednesday, police in Worcester, west of Boston, pleaded for a resolution, saying they were spending tens of thousands of dollars to protect the funeral home where his body is being kept amid protests.

An expert in U.S. burial law said the resistance to Tsarnaev’s burial is unprecedented in a country that has always found a way to put to rest its notorious killers, from Lee Harvey Oswald to Adam Lanza, who gunned down 20 children and six educators at a Newtown, Conn., elementary school last year.

Peter Stefan, whose funeral home accepted Tsarnaev’s body last week, said Tuesday that none of the 120 offers of graves from the U.S. and Canada has worked out because officials in those cities and towns don’t want the body.

In Russia, officials aren’t commenting after Tsarnaev’s mother said authorities won’t allow her son’s body into the country so she can bury him in her native Dagestan.

Smith reported from Providence, R.I. Associated Press writers Bridget Murphy and Rodrique Ngowi in Boston, and Arsen Mollayev in Makhachkala, Russia, also contributed to this report.

BOSTON/WASHINGTON — The two brothers suspected of carrying out the deadly attacks on the Boston Marathon had originally planned to set off their bombs on July 4, a law enforcement official said.

The official said the suspects, Tamerlan and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, advanced the date of their attack because they completed building bombs more quickly then they originally anticipated. The official declined to be identified and did not offer more details.

Police say the brothers detonated two bombs made with pressure-cookers in the April 15 attack on the Boston Marathon that killed three people and wounded 264.

An attack on Boston’s packed July 4 celebrations would have carried the extra symbolism of disrupting the city’s widely followed Independence Day celebrations.

Citing unnamed officials, The Boston Globe reported on its website that Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, the younger brother who was captured by police four days after the bombing, told investigators the pair discussed detonating their explosives at the city’s famed celebration on its Charles River Esplanade.

News of the alleged July 4 attack plan and other details supplied by Tsarnaev to investigators was earlier reported by The New York Times and other media outlets.

NBC News, also citing unnamed officials, reported Tsarnaev told investigators the bombs were made in the home of his brother Tamerlan, who was killed in a shootout with police early on April 19.

The Times reported the ethnic Chechen brothers also considered suicide attacks and that they had viewed online sermons by Anwar al-Awlaki, a radical U.S.-born cleric who was killed by an American drone strike in Yemen in 2011. There is no indication the brothers communicated with Awlaki, however, the newspaper reported on its website.

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What, if any, ties the two suspects had with foreign militants is a key question for investigators trying to determine how the pair became radicalized. How they selected their target would also shed light on their mindset.

Mitch Silber, executive managing director at K2 Intelligence and former head of intelligence analysis at the New York City Police Department, said a July 4 attack in Boston might have been more deadly given the fact that greater numbers of people gather for the city’s annual celebration.

Former federal prosecutor Mark Rasch said a July 4 attack would have sent a stronger message.

“The essence of terrorism is all about symbolism,” Rasch said. “The Boston Marathon just does not have as much of a symbolic feeling as the Fourth of July to the United States.”

The essence of terrorism is all about symbolism. The Boston Marathon just does not have as much of a symbolic feeling as the Fourth of July to the United States

Tamerlan Tsarnaev was 26 when he was killed in the shootout with police in Watertown, Massachusetts. Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, 19, was wounded in the shootout and captured later that day.

Both are also suspected of killing a university police officer. Another officer was badly wounded in the Watertown confrontation.

Dzhokhar Tsarnaev has been charged with crimes in connection with the bombing that could carry the death penalty if he is convicted, and is being held at a prison medical facility in Devens, Massachusetts.

SUSPECT’S BODY CLAIMED

Tamerlan Tsarnaev’s remains were claimed on behalf of his family on Thursday. His body had been kept at a Boston facility for more than a week.

Terrel Harris, a spokesman for the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner of Massachusetts, said a funeral services company retained by the family had claimed the body. Harris declined to provide details including the cause of death or where the body had been taken.

On Tuesday, Tsarnaev’s widow, Katherine Russell, said through an attorney that she wished his remains to be released to the Tsarnaev family.

Russell’s attorney could not immediately be reached on Thursday.

Investigators have questioned Russell as they seek clues about how the suspects allegedly built the two bombs used in the attack and whether they had help.

The Tsarnaevs’ parents previously lived in Cambridge, Massachusetts, but have since returned to Russia. Other relatives remain in the United States, including an uncle, Ruslan Tsarni of Montgomery Village, Maryland

The Tsarnaevs’ parents previously lived in Cambridge, Massachusetts, but have since returned to Russia. Other relatives remain in the United States, including an uncle, Ruslan Tsarni of Montgomery Village, Maryland.

Officials said on Thursday that three men who had been charged with interfering with the investigation of the bombing were in custody at a jail in Middleton, Massachusetts, a small town about 20 miles (30 km) North of Boston.

The three 19-year-olds – Azamat Tazhayakov, Dias Kadyrbayev and Robel Phillipos – had been transported to the Essex County Correctional Facility in Middleton on Wednesday after they were charged in Boston. Authorities have described them as college friends of Dzhokhar Tsarnaev. (Additional reporting by Svea Herbst-Bayliss; Editing by Mohammad Zargham)

Katherine Russell was an “All-American” girl who played saxophone, was on her high school dance team and wanted to join the Peace Corps.

But she suddenly changed after meeting and marrying Boston Marathon bomber Tamerlan Tsarnaev, according to friends.

She dropped out of college after only a year, converted to Islam and began wearing the hijab.

Now federal authorities want to question her in the hopes she can shed some light on the motive behind the bombings that killed three people and injured more than 180.

Her lawyer, Amato DeLuca, said she did not speak to federal officials who came to her parents’ home in North Kingstown, R.I., Sunday evening, where she had been staying since her husband was killed during a getaway attempt early Friday.

Mr. DeLuca said he was discussing with officials about how to proceed.

“I spoke to them, and that’s all I can say right now,” he said. “We’re deciding what we want to do and how we want to approach this.”

But he revealed that Ms. Tsarnaev, 24, only discovered her husband was “Suspect 1″ in the bombings when she saw pictures on TV.

Her family — her father, Warren, 55, is a casualty doctor and her mother, Judith, 56, is a nurse — were also shocked.

“In the aftermath of the Patriots’ Day horror, we know that we never really knew Tamerlan Tsarnaev,” Judith Russell said in a statement.

Mr. DeLuca also offered new details on Tamerlan Tsarnaev’s movements in the days after the bombings, saying the last day he was alive that “he was home” when his wife left for work. When asked whether anything seemed amiss to his wife following the bombings, Mr. DeLuca responded, “Not as far as I know.”

Mr. DeLuca said his client did not suspect her husband of anything, and that there was no reason for her to have suspected him. He said she had been working 70 to 80 hours, seven days a week as a home health care aide. While she was at work, her husband cared for their toddler daughter, he said.

“When this allegedly was going on, she was working, and had been working all week to support her family,” he said.

Ms. Tsarnaev was attending Suffolk University in Boston when friends introduced her to her future husband at a nightclub, Mr. DeLuca said. They dated on and off, then married in 2009 or 2010, he said. They have a three-year-old child.

Glenn DePriest/Getty ImagesTamerlan Tsarnaev.

Neighbours said that Ms. Tsarnaev had converted to Islam and would dress in loose-fitting clothing and wear a veil over her hair, in keeping with Islamic traditions.

When asked why she converted, Mr. DeLuca replied: “She believes in the tenets of Islam and of the Koran. She believes in God.”

Friends and neighbours said the Tsarnaev couple would often be seen walking in the Rhode Island neighbourhood with their baby on weekends.

But there were reportedly problems. The website spotcrime.com said he was arrested for domestic violence in July 2009 after assaulting a woman.

His cousin, Zaur Tsarnaev, 26, made similar allegations about Tamerlan Tsarnaev, drawing the contrast with his “sweet innocent” brother Dzhokhar.

“He was always getting into trouble. He was never happy, never cheering, never smiling. He used to strike his girlfriend,” Mr. Zaur told The Boston Globe from the Dagestani capital.

In her high school year book, Ms. Tsarnaev wrote that her ambitions were to go to college and join the Peace Corps.

On Monday, it was revealed that Tamerlan Tsarnaev also influenced his mother, Zubeidat Tsarnaev, who arrived in America a decade ago and did a beautician’s course. She dressed in high heels and short skirts.

It was initially Mrs. Tsarnaev’s concern that her party-going son might slip into a life of drinking, smoking and drugs that led both to explore their Islamic heritage.

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Tamerlan Tsarnaev then became more devout, encouraging his mother to do the same, she said.

Mrs. Tsarnaev told The Daily Telegraph: “That’s how he began to study the Koran and go deeper into Islam. And from that moment he gave up bad habits and we started to go deeper together, and pray together.

“Tamerlan said to me, ‘You know mama, you are pushing me toward the truth, but I would like you to wear a hijab. A woman in Islam should be concealed’.”

After that, relations from Russia, communicating by Skype, were shocked to see her wearing a veil. She stopped working at a spa and only took clients at home.

A client, Alyssa Kilzer, 23, a writer and yoga teacher, said Mrs. Tsarnaev started referring to conspiracy theories about September 11, saying: “My sons know all about it.”